The Mughal Dynasties

Using a degree of selectivity, it proved possible to bring together some of the rulers of the eastern Muslim world up to about 1900 as a fairly coherent group. They were: the dynasties of the Delhi Sultanate, 1206-1526, which created the framework in which the subcontinent came, by the twenty-first century, to support one-third of the world's Muslims; the II-Khanids, 1256-1340, the descendants of Chinghiz (Genghis) Khan through Hulagu (r.1256-65), who began to lay the basis of modern Iran; the Timurids, 1370-1506, the descendants of the last mighty Mongol conqueror, Timur [Tamerlane], who fashioned a brilliant Persianate civilisation in Iran, Central Asia and Afghanistan; the Mughals, 1526-40, 1555-1858, who ruled the greatest and richest of the Muslim 'gunpowder empires'; the Safavids, 1501-1773, who made Iran into a mainly Shia society, at the same time achieving new heights of artistic excellence; and the Qajars, 1796-1925, who valiantly strove to build up central power in Iran as they were increasingly hemmed in by pressure from Russian and British expansion.